My aim is to offer insights into some of the more subtle principles underpinning prints. The commentary is based on thirty-eight years of teaching and the prints and other collectables that I am focusing on are those which I have acquired over the years.
In the galleries of prints (accessed by clicking the links immediately below) I am also adding fresh images offered for sale. If you get lost in the maze of links, simply click the "home" button to return to the blog discussions.

Condition: faultless
impression with margins as publish in excellent condition—almost pristine—apart
from a faint stain towards the lower right corner of the margin.

I am selling
this original and very famous drypoint by Rodin for a total cost of AU$487
(currently US$359.38/EUR339.15/GBP289.01 at the time of this listing) including
postage and handling to anywhere in the world.

If you are
interested in purchasing this genuine Rodin, please contact me
(oz_jim@printsandprinciples.com) and I will send you a PayPal invoice to make
the payment easy.

This print has been sold

When I was a
student I remember looking at what seemed like an endless array of portraits that
history has deemed to be "masterworks." At the time, I could see that they were “well done”,
but no one took the trouble to explain what made a master portrait different to
a skilfully executed one. Mindful of this shortfall in information, I thought I might offer a personal evaluation of what makes
this image a masterwork.

Let me begin by
proposing that knowledge about perspective, anatomy and technical skills play
only a small part in creating a masterwork. This may sound like a surprising
suggestion, but if I were to describe how a master artist draws a chair, for
instance, few masters would begin by laying down a network of perspective guidelines. Instead, a master is more likely to draw from a personal experience of
sitting in a chair and draw the chair from a sense of touch (i.e. a haptic
approach where the drawing instrument becomes an imaginary hand). The outcome
of drawing from experience rather than by formula is that the chair drawn
from the experience of sitting in one is more likely to be convincingly real.
In short, drawing is not so much about technical knowledge (but it is still an
element), rather it is about intuitively “feeling’ the subject into the drawn
image—a bit like Michelangelo who asserted that he could “see”/”feel” the
figure he was sculpting within the marble.

If I now turn
to this masterwork portrait of Antonin Proust, note how the fine strokes of the
burin describing Proust’s chest are not a mechanical alignment hatched lines
reproducing the surface contours of his chest. Instead they are exploratory
strokes where each one is laid as if Rodin was searching and metaphorically “feeling”
the form of Proust’s chest.

At this point I
need to point out that when Rodin executed this portrait, his approach was not
to sit Proust in a fixed position and to draw what he saw as precisely as he
could. Such an approach is not the way that master artists work. Rodin knew
that he had to move around his subject (Proust) so that he “understood” at an
intimate level the form of his sitter’s head. This acquired knowledge then
guided each stroke that Rodin made.